THE WORLD'S OLDEST UNIVERSITY AND ITS FINANCING EXPERIENCE: A STUDY ON AL-QARAWIYYIN UNIVERSITY (859-990)

Al-Qarawiyyin University's independence in terms of finances had been a significant and influential factor in making it possible for the university to maintain its high quality. Therefore, this paper aims to examine and analyse the financial sources for the development and operation of this university. It reviews and analyses historical data through relevant literature and documents. Waqf played a significant role in providing financial assistance to the university's communities and in strengthening its academic quality. There were four significant types of waqf sources which were the individual fund, the collective waqf fund, the Sultan fund and the alumni fund along with different other types of charities, i.e. sadaqah. This article adds new knowledge by examining the financing experiences of the world's oldest university. It is expected that the instance of Al-Qarawiyyin University may contribute to finding out a solution for the funding crises in contemporary institutions. This review is hoped to constitute a significant contribution to scholarship in general and act as a suggestion for solving the contemporary funding crisis of higher educational institutions.   Keywords: Al-Qarawiyyin University, financing higher education, Morocco, Waqf.   Cite as: Hoque, M. N., & Abdullah, M. F. (2021). The world's oldest university and its financing experience: A study on Al-Qarawiyyin University (859-990).  Journal of Nusantara Studies, 6(1), 24-41. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol6iss1pp24-4

Eco-friendly and organic farming in Bangladesh : International classification and local practice

Agriculture plays a crucial role in overall economic development of agro –based developing countries like Bangladesh. In those countries, green revolution emerged in 1960s with the slogan of "produce more food". Within a couple of years, farmers received "package technologies" of HYV seed-fertilizer-irrigation. With the adoption of these technologies, farmers started to use chemicals and they were getting more production for a decade. Most of the newly developed inputs and technologies were subsidised, even free that time. After some years, farmers as well as policy makers get warning of yield reduction and large negative impact on human and the environment like degradation in soil quality, contamination of groundwater, increased costs of production, health hazards, etc. The uses of chemicals as well as prices are still increasing every year in Bangladesh. Question rise, how long the process of exploiting land and other natural resources - could be continued. We must find the alternate ways before going the situation at an uncontrolled level. The study is an attempt to protect natural agricultural resource bases from further degradation in Bangladesh and to ensure long term sustainability in agricultural system. With the concept of sustainability of agriculture, developed countries are practicing "organic farming", where they strictly maintain standards and regulations. The developing countries are practicing organic for export and in many places, for local consumption, the farmers are trying to reduce the overall use or indiscriminate use of chemicals in agriculture – that is very often termed as "eco-friendly". Based on the overall situation, the objectives of the study are to compare Bangladeshi standards with international rules and to look for the constraints and possibilities of eco-friendly way of farming in Bangladesh. Qualitative research method has been followed to conduct the study. Data have been collected from three different sources – documents, interviews and observations. A total of 22 key informants have been selected by following purposive and snowball sampling technique. Interviews were recorded through digital voice recorder and transcribed verbatim by researcher. Transcripts were then entered into MAXQDA10, a qualitative data management software programme. A coding frame was developed considering research questions. Data were analysed in the light of inductive approach. For comparison purpose, a couple of important international standards have been chosen like, IFOAM basic standards, CODEX Alimentarius guidelines, EU regulations, USDA, Japanese agricultural standards (JAS), NAASA and Indian Organic Standards. The IFOAM Norms and Codex Guidelines stand are the two international organic baseline standards. The three standards EU, USDA and JAS are the main regulations that dominate all other standards and influence the "organic product" growing countries. The comparisons have been made based on the "IFOAM Basic Production Standards" such as land conversion to organic, Selection of crops and varieties, Soil fertility and fertilization, pest, diseases, weeds and growth management, avoiding contamination etc. private and government level. Among all NGOs, the study chose Proshika, Ubinig and Community Development Association. Two private organizations (Dhamrai dairy and Kazi and Kazi tea farm) have also been selected. Besides, few organic researchers and extension workers from different govt. institutions have been chosen as the key informants of this study. Organic concept in Bangladesh is introduced and carried out by NGOs. At present, govt. also started to think about sustainability in agriculture. In terms of production practices, Proshika gives emphasise on crop rotation and compost, UBINIG – on local variety seeds and govt. – on pest management. Nayakrishi farmers are very near to the standard of EU, USA and Japan. Kazi farm is already exporting 100% of their products in the USA and EU countries. Proshika and BARI farmers and Dhamrai dairy need to improve animal husbandry and fertilizer management to reach at international level. Bangladesh agriculture is in vicious circle due to using chemicals. The major barriers that have been found in this study could be classified as: government thinking of "organic farming has negative impact of on food security", excessive promotion of hybrid seed in the name of "availability of good quality seeds", allocation of budget to subsidy on chemical inputs, insufficiency of organic inputs, farmers poor knowledge, increase in the area under HYV, sales promotion by pesticide dealers and companies, regulation of pesticide marketing, lack of consumers awareness, lack of media campaign, problems of organic product marketing etc. Still there are positive points that make us hopeful that "organic way of farming" is possible in Bangladesh. Researchers have pointed that organic agriculture could be a way to food security for small and marginal farmers as well as consumers. Now, it is also realized at policy level that "we are at crossroads to review whether the current use of agro chemicals is appropriate". To reduce the use of chemicals in Bangladesh agriculture, the research has forwarded some important recommendations, like, quality seed production at domestic level, introducing organic friendly agriculture policy, broadcasting in media on "the harmful effects of conventional agriculture", farmers´ training and participatory research, establish an independent organic farming research institute, eco-village, increase the manpower at DAE, organic farming in education curriculum, development of marketing system, etc. Generally speaking, government and non-government organizations should concentrate their highest efforts in identifying the key problems. Short, medium and long term goals and standards should be established to achieve sustainable food security. However, at this moment we have to trade off among sufficient food production to keep pace with population growth, alleviating poverty, increase the intensity of agricultural production and maintaining favourable ecological conditions for sustainable agriculture.Obwohl die Landwirtschaft eine entscheidende Rolle bei der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung des Landes Bangladesch spielt, haben die Vorgehensweisen in der modernen Landwirtschaft negative Auswirkungen für die Bauern und die Umwelt. Es gibt erhebliche Probleme hinsichtlich Erosion und Verarmung der Böden und der Verschmutzung des Grundwassers mit Pestiziden. Die Produktionskosten steigen, die Betriebe der Bauernfamilien verarmen und die Qualität der Lebensmittel nimmt immer weiter ab und stellt eine Bedrohung für die Gesundheit der Bevölkerung dar. Die Anwendung von Chemikalien und Düngemitteln nimmt in Bangladesch jedes Jahr weiter zu, weil die Bauern aufgrund der abnehmenden Bodenfruchtbarkeit nicht die erwarteten Produktionsmengen erzielen. Gleichzeitig steigen die Aufwendungen für die landwirtschaftlichen Produktionsfaktoren. Infolgedessen werden die Bauern Tag für Tag ärmer. Es ist fraglich, wie lange dieser Prozess der Ausbeutung der Böden und anderer Umweltressourcen noch weiter gehen kann. Die natürlichen Ressourcen sind schon in großem Ausmaß zerstört. Ein Ausweg besteht darin, sich für umweltfreundliche Maßnahmen zuentscheiden, die sowohl dem augenblicklichen Bedarf decken als auch die zukünftige Nutzung sicherstellen. Dies ist notendig, bevor die Situation außer Kontrolle gerät. Die vorliegende Studie ist ein Versuch, die natürlichen landwirtschaftlichen Ressourcen Bangladeschs vor weiterem Raubbau zu schützen und eine nachhaltige Produktion sicherzustellen. Die Literatur zum „organischen Landbau“ hat wirkungsvolle Ansätze um in dieser Situation nachhaltige Verbesserungen zu erreichen. Um ökologische Produkte zu verkaufen, ist eine Zertifizierung erforderlich, die mit hohen Kosten verbunden ist, was für bengalische Bauern kaum zu verwirklichen ist. Außerdem ist es das erklärte Ziel der Regierung in der Lebensmittelversorgung autark zu werden. Es gibt Befürchtungen von dieser Seite, dass ökologische Praktiken zu verminderter Produktion und noch größerer Abhängigkeit führen könnten

CovTiNet: Covid text identification network using attention-based positional embedding feature fusion

Covid text identification (CTI) is a crucial research concern in natural language processing (NLP). Social and electronic media are simultaneously adding a large volume of Covid-affiliated text on the World Wide Web due to the effortless access to the Internet, electronic gadgets and the Covid outbreak. Most of these texts are uninformative and contain misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that create an infodemic. Thus, Covid text identification is essential for controlling societal distrust and panic. Though very little Covid-related research (such as Covid disinformation, misinformation and fake news) has been reported in high-resource languages (e.g. English), CTI in low-resource languages (like Bengali) is in the preliminary stage to date. However, automatic CTI in Bengali text is challenging due to the deficit of benchmark corpora, complex linguistic constructs, immense verb inflexions and scarcity of NLP tools. On the other hand, the manual processing of Bengali Covid texts is arduous and costly due to their messy or unstructured forms. This research proposes a deep learning-based network (CovTiNet) to identify Covid text in Bengali. The CovTiNet incorporates an attention-based position embedding feature fusion for text-to-feature representation and attention-based CNN for Covid text identification. Experimental results show that the proposed CovTiNet achieved the highest accuracy of 96.61±.001% on the developed dataset (BCovC) compared to the other methods and baselines (i.e. BERT-M, IndicBERT, ELECTRA-Bengali, DistilBERT-M, BiLSTM, DCNN, CNN, LSTM, VDCNN and ACNN)

Authorship Classification in a Resource Constraint Language Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Authorship classification is a method of automatically determining the appropriate author of an unknown linguistic text. Although research on authorship classification has significantly progressed in high-resource languages, it is at a primitive stage in the realm of resource-constraint languages like Bengali. This paper presents an authorship classification approach made of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) comprising four modules: embedding model generation, feature representation, classifier training and classifier testing. For this purpose, this work develops a new embedding corpus (named WEC) and a Bengali authorship classification corpus (called BACC-18), which are more robust in terms of authors’ classes and unique words. Using three text embedding techniques (Word2Vec, GloVe and FastText) and combinations of different hyperparameters, 90 embedding models are created in this study. All the embedding models are assessed by intrinsic evaluators and those selected are the 9 best performing models out of 90 for the authorship classification. In total 36 classification models, including four classification models (CNN, LSTM, SVM, SGD) and three embedding techniques with 100, 200 and 250 embedding dimensions, are trained with optimized hyperparameters and tested on three benchmark datasets (BACC-18, BAAD16 and LD). Among the models, the optimized CNN with GloVe model achieved the highest classification accuracies of 93.45%, 95.02%, and 98.67% for the datasets BACC-18, BAAD16, and LD, respectively

Access to Credit, Education, and Women’s Say in the Household: Evidence from Bangladesh

A substantial literature on women’s say in the household focuses on microcredit, but there is little evidence on the relative roles of credit and education. Using household survey data from Bangladesh, we provide a comparative analysis of the effects of education and microcredit on women’s decision making power in the household. We implement two econometric approaches: bias adjusted OLS estimator of Oster (2019) that extends the Altonji et al. (2005) approach where selection on observables is used as a guide to selection on unobservables, and doubly robust radius matching estimator of Lechner et al. (2011). The evidence suggests a limited impact of microcredit, consistent with the recent evidence from RCT based studies. In contrast, education is much more important for enhancing women’s say in a range of household decisions. There is no significant interaction effect between education and credit. Evidence from Gelbach decomposition suggests that outside employment is an important mediating mechanism, but household wealth and assortative marriage matching on education are not important. The impact of education on women’s decision making remains strong even after controlling for these mediating factors, pointing to the importance of other mechanisms such as self-confidence and better negotiation skills of educated women

INTEGRATED ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING INITIATIVES IN THE MALAYSIAN BANKING INDUSTRY TOWARDS FATF FULL-COMPLIANT STATUS

Background and Purpose: This study aims to demonstrate the integrated anti-money laundering (AML) initiatives in the Malaysian banking industry, with particular focus towards achieving the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) full-compliant status.   Methodology: This study adopts a qualitative approach, which includes reviews and analysis of secondary data in relevant literature and documents relating to money laundering risk in the Malaysian banking industry.   Findings: The integrated AML initiatives combine domestic and international efforts, which are anchored by the Malaysian Central Bank and FATF, respectively. Malaysia has been proactively abiding by the FATF requirements, and affirmative progression can be seen from the improved FATF-compliant status throughout the years.   Conclusion and Contributions: This study adds new knowledge to the existing literature by integrating domestic and international AML efforts. Achieving a FATF full-compliant status is not impossible for Malaysia with the current integrated AML initiatives in place, and this forms a strong pillar that could protect the Malaysian banking industry from money laundering risk. Keywords: Money laundering, AML, risk, banking industry, Malaysia.   Cite as: Mat Isa, Y., Hoque, M. N., Mohd Sanusi, Z., & Haniff, M. N. (2023). Integrated anti-money laundering initiatives in the Malaysian banking industry towards FATF full-compliant status. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(1), 117-139. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss1pp117-13

Prevalence of Arsenic-related Skin Lesions in 53 Widely-scattered Villages of Bangladesh: An Ecological Survey

A survey was carried out to provide a representative assessment of prevalence and risk of arsenic-related skin lesions in relation to geographical distribution of arsenic in wells of rural Bangladesh as a necessary background for research into effects in pregnancy and cancer risks. A systematic random sample of 53 villages in four divisions of Bangladesh served by Gonoshasthaya Kendra was selected, and all women aged 18 years or more (n=16,740) were listed. Trained paramedics recorded the presence of skin thickening and nodules on the palms and soles, together with information on tubewell use. The prevalence was related to the mean concentration of arsenic for the district as indicated by data from the British Geological Survey and to the date the first well in the village was installed. Overall, the observed prevalence was 176 cases (1.3%) in 13,705 women examined, varying from 0% in 26 villages to 23% in one; lesions were observed more frequently on hands than on feet. The estimate doubled with concentrations of arsenic from 11 to 6450 \u3bcg/L and increased more than 20 times at >50 \u3bcg/L. In the absence of further information, priority for control measures should be directed at areas where the average concentrations of arsenic are above 50 \u3bcg/L, especially in villages where skin lesions have been identified